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Mississippi Republican Gov. Phil Bryant shows off a gold shovel he was awarded for the state’s economic progress as he leaves the stage at the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Miss., Thursday, July 27, 2017. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis)

The need for workforce training opportunities for low-income and underemployed Mississippians existed long before the pandemic began in March.

But despite efforts by the state’s economic development and business leaders in the last few years to consolidate workforce development information, officials still don’t know the scope of taxpayer-funded training happening across the state and its results, several officials told Mississippi Today.

In a state with one of the lowest median household incomes in the nation, just under $45,000 in 2018, leaders have often pointed to workforce development as the answer to raising earnings and curbing poverty.

A key workforce initiative began in 2016 when the Legislature agreed to allocate $50 million over 10 years for then-Gov. Phil Bryant’s Mississippi Works Training Fund, which was supposed to help community colleges and other workforce training programs bulk up their operations. The program is administered by the Mississippi Development Authority, the agency tasked with spearheading economic development in the state.

By March, nearly four years in, the state had spent less than 10% of that funding, or about $4.7 million.

Though it allocated $1 million of the fund last year to the much touted Mississippi Works Apprenticeship pilot program, none of that money had been spent by March, according to documents Mississippi Development Authority provided Mississippi Today through a records request.

Excluding $607,000 spent on the Career Tech Scholars program, which offers tuition assistance to students across the state, nearly 80% of the funds spent so far have been concentrated on the eastern part of the state, nearly delineated by Interstate 55 and which is just 31% Black.

The Delta and southwest quadrant encompassing the capital city, an area that is nearly 60% Black, has received just $235,590 and $719,285, respectively.

“It is now time to make the investment in Mississippi’s workforce before it is too late,” Bryant said in his 2016 State of the State address. “We have $50 million sitting idle in the Unemployment Trust Fund. Let’s invest it now in workforce training, and I will show you Mississippi’s greatest potential. We can lead the nation in economic development if you will give us the tools to reach these goals … Rush with me through the entrance to the future, or stand behind as it closes on the careers of Mississippi’s next generation. The choice is yours.”

The Legislature did not use money from the Unemployment Trust Fund, but made a separate allocation to pay for the $50 million Mississippi Works Training Fund. But the trust fund, which employers pay into through their taxes, does support another training program called Workforce Enhancement Training, sometimes referred to as WET funds, which the state’s community colleges administer based on training needs and requests from employers.

“There is not a conflict with this administration in demanding accountability for these workforce funds,” Bryant added.

Yet several workforce development officials in the state told Mississippi Today that training efforts remain siloed, meaning leaders don’t know how much total money Mississippi spends on workforce development or if it’s used efficiently.

“We don’t know where all the dollars are,” said Sen. Joey Fillingane, R-Sumrall, author of the legislation that created the Mississippi Works Training Fund.

Bill Renick, who oversees the state’s federal workforce plan for Three Rivers Planning and Development District, the local workforce area covering north Mississippi, said he’s hopeful that legislation passed in 2020 will offer more coordination and transparency within the state’s training efforts.

Senate Bill 2564, passed earlier this year, restructured the state’s State Workforce Investment Board, which is meant to be a workforce development clearinghouse, to limit its members and allow for it to build up a staff of workforce specialists. It also increased requirements that state agencies and entities report workforce spending and outcomes to the board.

The Mississippi Works Training Fund was intended to “enhance training opportunities at the state’s 15 community colleges,” according to the development authority’s website, with 75% of the money dedicated to new job creation and 25% to existing industry.

Fillingane said the training fund primarily exists as a lure to attract companies to the state. It’s an additional resource for employers who are locating in Mississippi, in the same way that the state may pay for infrastructure improvements surrounding new construction at a business.

“It’s only there in the event that’s what they need,” Fillingane said. “Perhaps we should reduce the number of dollars in that particular pot and put it somewhere where it would be used more frequently.”

WET funds work similarly: “WET funds are primarily used to train company employees on whatever the company needs and wants,” said Andrea Mayfield, director of the Mississippi Community College Board.

In other words, if an underemployed Mississippian wanted to go back to community college to gain a particular skill, neither of these funds would necessarily pay for their training, unless a company had already requested it.

The state awarded nearly $12 million of the Mississippi Works fund by March. Some grants remain open but others have closed before the workforce partners used all the funding.

The first to receive Mississippi Works grant awards in 2016 were the Furniture Academy ($250,000) and Mississippi State University engineers ($169.751) — only a little over a third of which had been spent by March of 2020.

Other companies benefiting from the program include Sephora ($165,396), FedEx ($600,000), Milwaukee Tool ($1.5 million) and Pearl River Foods ($500,000), one of the food processing companies whose Mississippi plant was raided by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in 2019.

Gov. Tate Reeves promised a $100 million investment in workforce training while on the campaign trail in late 2019. In July, the Legislature allocated $55 million of its $1.25 billion CARES Act pandemic relief to workforce development, a program called ReSkillMS, about $5 million of which will go to employers through payroll subsidies. Most of the rest will go to community colleges for them to purchase needed equipment and build their training capacity.

All of the CARES money must be spent by the end of the year, meaning jobless Mississippians looking to use this opportunity to gain a new skill will be restricted to short-term training programs, such as truck driving or assistant nursing.

Meanwhile, Mississippi has the third smallest workforce participation rate in the nation behind West Virginia and Kentucky. Just under 54% of the working-age population in Mississippi was either working or looking for work in July, up from 52% in April. Mississippi historically falls among the bottom for this metric, including the month before the pandemic in February, when Mississippi had the single lowest workforce participation rate at under 56% compared to the national rate of about 64%.

The post Mississippi Works? Four years later, state has used just one-tenth of $50 million workforce fund appeared first on Mississippi Today.

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Eric J. Shelton/Mississippi Today

Students participate in class during the first day of school at Neshoba County Central Middle School on Wednesday, August 5, 2020.

Since the start of school earlier this month, nearly 900 Mississippi students, teachers or other employees in K-12 schools have tested positive for the coronavirus, according to recently released data by the Mississippi Department of Health.

For the first time, the department is providing information on infections in schools. Every K-12 school in Mississippi, public and private, is required to report information each week on cases and outbreaks among students and staff.

Most public school districts have opened or plan to open this month, though some schools started class as early as July and some won’t start back until after Labor Day. According to data from the Mississippi Department of Education, there were 465,913 students enrolled in public schools during the 2019-2020 school year.

The MSDH data is broken down by county, not individual school or school district. In all, 720 schools in 74 counties reported this information to the state.

Tunica County has the highest student infection rate per capita (the number of cases per 10,000 people) at 13.8, followed closely by Alcorn at 12.9.

Coahoma County currently has the highest per capita rate of teacher and school staff infection at 7.6, with Quitman County following at 6.8 per capita.

You can access a map that breaks down total infection rates by county here.

When combining all school-related Coronavirus cases — both students and school staff —Tunica and Alcorn counties again had the highest infection rate per capita at 17.7 and 15.9.

These numbers were published Aug. 25; the Mississippi Department of Health has stated they will be updated weekly.

Look up information on a specific county here:

Erica Hensley, Alex Rozier and Kayleigh Skinner contributed to this report.

The post Interactive: How many students and teachers have tested positive for COVID-19 in your county? appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Jump! Existing law makes Mississippi one of the most difficult places in the nation to vote early. Read more here.

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Eric J. Shelton/Mississippi Today, Report For America

A sign notifying voters where they can cast their votes sits outside of Chastain Middle School during Mississippi’s Primary Election Day, Tuesday, August 6, 2019.

A second lawsuit has been filed challenging Mississippi’s restrictive absentee voting requirements in advance of the Nov. 3 general election.

Most states allow people to vote early in person and by mail, but to do so in Mississippi, voters must provide an excuse, such as being away from home on election. The existing law makes Mississippi one of the most difficult places in the nation to vote early.

On Thursday, the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the Southern Poverty Law Center and private attorneys have filed a lawsuit in the federal court for the Southern District of Mississippi on behalf of state residents and organizations claiming the state’s absentee voting rules are unconstitutional because they could jeopardize the health of citizens trying to vote during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The suit was filed against Secretary of State Michael Watson and Attorney General Lynn Fitch.

“Mississippi has some of the most restrictive burdens on absentee voting in the nation that run afoul of the Constitution and have a particularly stark impact on Black voters,” Jennifer Nwachukwa, counsel at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said in a news release. “As a historic number of people are expected to cast their ballot this fall amid the ongoing pandemic, election officials have failed to take action that will ensure that all voters across Mississippi will have their voice heard. With weeks to go before the November election, we are turning to the court to defend the right to vote for people across Mississippi.”

Even though the state has the nation’s second highest number of coronavirus cases per capita, Mississippi is one of the six states that “do not allow legitimate fear of illness from COVID-19 as an excuse to request an absentee ballot,” according to the lawsuit.

The lawsuit said Mississippi laws and regulations do not comply with the federal Centers for Disease Control and Preventions guidelines developed to help ensure voter safety.

The lawsuit says Watson, the state’s chief elections officer, did not rule that changes made by the Legislature earlier this year would allow people concerned with the coronavirus to vote early either in person or by mail. Watson has said he is waiting on an official opinion from Attorney General Fitch’s office on just how the new legislation would impact early voting during the pandemic.

The state requirement of having both an application for an absentee ballot and the ballot notarized also places voters at more risk because they have to leave their homes twice to seek out an official to notarize the documents, the lawsuit maintains.

The issues addressed in the lawsuit are similar to those filed in a state court case earlier this month by the Mississippi Center for Justice, the American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Mississippi on behalf of a group of Mississippians concerned about voter safety.

The post Second lawsuit filed to ease Mississippi’s voting restrictions during COVID-19 pandemic appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Yvonne Moore, left, and Christy Carmichael collect specimen for COVID-19 testing outside of the Aaron E Henry Community Health Services Center in Clarksdale, Miss., Wednesday, March 29, 2020.

Mississippi this week took over the nation’s highest infection rate after hovering in the top several states for weeks.

Almost all of Mississippi’s daily COVID-19 metrics have improved over recent weeks — but so have other hot-spot states that drove summer surges.

On Tuesday, Mississippi averaged 29 daily new cases per 100,000 people over the last seven days, or about 6,000 weekly cases total. Though both the daily case average and total weekly cases have fallen in recent weeks — daily case counts have dropped by almost half since they peaked almost exactly one month ago — they still top the U.S. per capita. By Thursday, North Dakota overtook Mississippi based on a recent influx of new cases.

Further, Mississippi now sees the nation’s fourth-highest infection rate per capita since the pandemic began, according to national data collected by the COVID Tracking Project. Mississippi has now surpassed states that had early, large surges but have since flattened out, such as New Jersey and New York which held top spots until recently.

Mississippi is now only behind Louisiana, Florida and Arizona for cumulative cases per 100,000 people.

Hospitalizations in particular have seen major improvements over the past weeks, seeing the first steep decline since the pandemic began and hitting their lowest point this week since early July.

Dr. Alan Jones, who oversees University of Mississippi Medical Center’s COVID-19 response, says the lull is welcome, but it’s not enough yet and warns Mississippians and policy makers alike to maintain the progress made.

“What the medical community is holding its breath about is, we are seeing a reprieve, but we have schools re-opening, colleges going back, we have football games starting to take place, we have more travel, people going back to work, Labor Day is coming up,” said Jones, assistant vice chancellor for clinical affairs. “We are all kind of holding our breath. A good two to six weeks after (re-openings), we believe we’ll see those numbers go back up in the wrong direction.”

He says the simple the measures that went into place over the past month — masking and reinforced social distancing — are now showing up in lagging indicators, like hospitalizations. But now, more than ever, is the time to stay vigilant, he said.

“If we can have policy makers continue to be resolved in seeing it through to the end — and not say, ‘Well, its been better for two weeks, so we’re going to lift the mask mandate, or we’re going to allow (larger) gatherings.’,” Jones said, hospitalization improvements might prolong. He added he hopes for hospitals’ sake that policy makers continue to be “extra cautious” and “extend those things that are in place where the Band-Aid’s already been ripped off, until we truly are seeing sustainable or lower transmission and we do believe that the pandemic is under control enough where you can begin to relax.”

He added: “And then when you do relax things, don’t go from closed down to wide open in  matter of days — gradually lead back into things such that you have effective behavior that will be maintained.”

Like hospitalizations, deaths also reflect case trends from previous weeks. Though they’ve declined since peaking late July, Mississippi still has the most new deaths per capita and the eighth-most deaths overall in the U.S.

Despite improvements, hospitalizations are still tight across the state. Last week 15 hospitals had zero ICU space available — meaning, of Mississippi’s hospitals that have ICU beds, 30% were full. Before the pandemic, ICUs across the state averaged about 66% capacity. Three-fourths of all hospitals were above that average as of last week, according to Mississippi Today’s analysis of the state health department’s new hospital capacity tracker, and 84% of all ICU beds were full.

As of last Monday, the 15 hospitals included some of the state’s biggest regional hospitals: Delta Regional in Greenville, Baptist’s locations in both Southaven and Jackson, Forrest General, and UMMC in Jackson, which tends to stay full.

As of Thursday, those regional hospitals were still full or close to it, and across the state 82% of ICU beds were full. Those offering the highest levels of COVID care (16 self-designated hospitals, as Levels 1 and 2) were 88% full.

As for running at sustained full-capacity, Jones says the current reprieve has helped reduce complex COVID care demands and allowed for some future planning. But he doesn’t expect it to linger as he sees schools, colleges and sports resume and new cases slowly start to tick back up.

“It’s human nature when you’re not in the eye of the storm, to lose sight of the fact that there is a storm. Numbers going down, fewer people we know have it, there are decreased hospitalizations — we become lackadaisical about things that resulted in that present reality,” Jones said. “You have people that just don’t even care anymore, I think that’s also just human nature.”

But he adds that complacency with individual behavior will drive the hospital back into critical levels that late July brought, and there’s only so much health care systems can do when people don’t follow guidelines, mandates or learn to “co-exist with the virus,” he says.

“It would be as if you had a MASH (mobile army surgical hospital) unit in a war where all of the soldiers just threw their guns down, didn’t fight back and just got shot. You’re just going to get overwhelmed and your interpretation is going to be, ‘You guys didn’t do what you were supposed to do or needed to do to help us.’ How can you expect us to be able to take up all that slack?” he said. “There’s not enough resources. It requires everybody to do their part. If you look at countries that have managed to control this — every human in various roles has managed to do their part, for the most part.”

The post Mississippi still tops nation’s new COVID-19 infection rate despite improving statistics appeared first on Mississippi Today.